Peripheral (e)motions was, for me, an expansion of the questions I first began in The Stories that Write Us: how do women’s inner lives become visible, shared, and spoken back to one another? Presented in December 2022 at VMeme Contemporary Art Gallery, the exhibition extended my earlier exploration of women’s cusps into a more layered, collective conversation.

In this body of work, I wanted the image to move beyond its frame. I collaborated with 13 writers, inviting them to use my artworks as prompts for their own writing, so that each piece could begin speaking in more than one voice. What emerged was not a linear interpretation but a succession of responses—personal, reflective, and distinctly human—each writer approaching the work through a different emotional doorway.

The process deepened further when an actor interpreted these writings and recorded them in audio form. This transformed the exhibition into an encounter of listening as much as seeing: the audience could stand before the artwork while hearing a writer’s reading of it, allowing the visual and the verbal to meet in the same moment. In that exchange, the work ceased to belong to me alone; it became shared territory, revised and reanimated through other sensibilities.

I have always been interested in the way art can become a site of emotional recognition, and in Peripheral (e)motions that impulse became a kind of circular conversation. The artist, the writer, the actor, and the audience were all implicated in the making of meaning, each adding a layer of story, memory, or interpretation to the original image. That circulation mattered to me because it mirrored the way experience itself works: we are shaped by what we witness, and we in turn reshape what we receive.

At its heart, the exhibition was an invitation to community. By opening the works to multiple voices, I wanted to affirm that women’s experiences do not remain peripheral when they are spoken, heard, and held in common. The exhibition asked the audience not only to observe but to enter conversation, and in that shared space, the private became collective, and the solitary became something larger than itself.